Exquisite: Highlander Kills Nobilis & Takes Its Stuff

[Shreyas Sampat]

Exquisite is starting to tie in with an idea I had for a Sorcerer setting, where demons were manifestations of your own madness, but the sorcerous secret community used them for, effectively, cockfighting.  You could subject yourself to psychological traumas - torturing your parents to death, spending a year without human contact, eating bits of your own flesh, whatever - to strengthen your demons, but you'd slowly lose your grip.  It was like Pokemon meets Unknown Armies.

Anyway, that's a subtle aspect of Exquisite - the Shards are not tools or friends, they are parasites; their Breaking has made them into dark, half-mad, skittering, crawling things.  They vaguely remember their glory and that makes their confined, helpless existence even more torturous.  Yet they are still the gateways to power and beauty and wonder.  Exquisites walk this narrow line - strengthening the Shard strengthens the self, but to feed its dark appetites too much is to become the darkness and the madness, and lose the self.  
There are those Exquisites who give away their power, fading to the dullness of mortality.  There are others who have lost the battle, and are swept along by the Shards, who are all, whether they know it or not, attempting to reassemble themselves, bringing about the rebirth of the gods and ending the Exquisite forever.  There are those who have found peace with their Shards, whether by deep soul-searching or by mighty disciplne and coercion, and these are the most dangerous of all.  Basically, Exquisites are very big people, thrust into a world that's very crowded and very dangerous, lonely though it may look.  There's less of that animistic Torchbearer vibe; anything important in Exquisite is someody's fault.

So, there are still holes in the mechanics - I need to work on the madness of the shard and the way that it clashes against the superhuman discipline of the Exquisite; I need to think about other ways that Shards can be manifest, indwelling other beings.  Trees and animals can be Exquisite too, and they don't usually have the power to hold back the Shard's will; they become unmortal agents of the Shard, not smart enough to really work out its half-formed plans but strong enough to be a thing to be feared.  There's a whole shard-trading economy going on that needs to be fleshed.

So it's more like "living out their passions while trying to survive the Godshard inside them and the world outside them."  Hope that helps.

[Mike Holmes]

Hope that helps.

Yes, for may part, absolutely. Thanks for the clarification. That's a much more down-to-earth premise from that angle.

Not that I'm not still a bit daunted, however. Realize too, however, that playing Nobilis daunts me as well. It's just not grabby for a guy like myself who can't think of what I'd do if I had all that power.

Mike

[Jonathan Walton]

How about some help for those of us who aren't as aesthetically gifted, eh Shreyas. :-)

Word.  This is something I'm often just as guilty of: conveying an aesthetic and then assuming that people can just extrapolate from it the critical piece of "what PCs do on a day to day basis."  Many people felt the 1st edition of Nobilis had exactly that problem, that R. Sean wrote a ton about who Nobles are and what it was like to be one, but said relatively little about what they did.  If I'm not careful, Ever-After is going to have the same problem with Masks.  Even after the second edition of Nobilis, we constantly get people on the Nobilist who don't quite grok it, asking questions like "What kind of Miracles could the Power of Mysteries do?"  I feel like Exquisite might have similar challanges.  People like you and me, who put aethetic as a #1 design priority (or try to) are much more comfortable just "improvising on a theme" than most people, steering the game in a direction that "feels right" and hoping for the best.  That's how I run my Nobilis games, anyway.

NOTE: Just got your response to Mike.  That does help clarify things a bunch and makes things much, much more interesting.  Love the parasite metaphor.  Always have.  So it really is Nobilis after all the gods have died.  I love the idea of shard-trading.  Bartering pieces of dead gods.  So loyal servants really could try to do the Osiris thing, finding al the shards of their god and putting them back together.  Now I get the Highlander reference, because you could kill all the other Exquisite in an effort to assemble all the shards.

To make a sidepoint, which I was heading towards before I read your response, I think the Code thing you've incorperated into the shards has the potential to help you out with the day-to-day issue.  Have a core set of values, even imposed ones, does give you some methods for figuring out behavior.  Perhaps the shards corrupting effects could be exhibited that way as well.  The longer you carry a shard or the more you draw on it, the more it demands of you.  Also, if you're carrying a whole bunch of different shards, they may have conflicting requirements that you can't all fulfill at once.  So you'd have the Argonauts crash-and-burn phenomenon.  And it would give people an incentive to try to collect the shards of the same god/pantheon, or complementary shards that wouldn't fight inside of them.  This also riffs on the Pokemon theme then: Gotta Catch 'Em All!

Do you have an aesthetic yet for what the godshards look like?  I think you could have a field day there: metal butterflies, flowers made of glass, just take simple objects and do the whole "earth looks unearthly" thing to them, exhibiting their unnatural, magical nature.  That way too, different Exquisite could recognise each other by the different "trophies" they carried.  Beware the lady draped in the shrouds of winter.

Just some thoughts.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Just one thought for now - the rendering of godshards.  Any one, or all three, of these could work for a given Exquisite game.

Godshards as Objects of Mystery
These are godshards as you have described them - roses woven of smoke, the veils of springtime, a flock of silver butterflies, a crown of glory.  These godshards, clearly, are something other than natural; they identify an Exquisite instantly and obviously.  A godshard of this kind is nature, stripped of some essential thing, so that it is an artistic perversion of logic.  Often it is a symbol of the god it represents, but it does not have to be - Amaterasu-Omi-Kami is known to have shards in the shapes of a weightless, glowing jewel, a sword of golden sunlight, a mirror that reflects nothing that is true, and a silver-mail glove studded with iron clockwork bees.

Godshards as Beauty Broken
Like Objects of Mystery, these are objects, but their one identifying trait is that they are broken, tarnished, corroded - somehow fallen from their former glory.  The jewel is cracked, the sword a handle with no blade, the mirror clouded with limescale, the bees are wingless and rattle with rust.  These shards exist to remind us of what the shards are - they are lesser, damaged pieces of greater beings.  They are not what they were.  With shards like these, Exquisites cannot be readily identified by their appearance, but they generally reveal themselves rapidly through their behavior.

Godshards as Spiritual Power
These godshards manifest as physical changes to the Exquisite, not as objects; they are pure spiritual force, and must be communicated via an exchange of life-carrying force.  The weakest shards may be transferred through a soul-searching look, but stronger ones need stronger media - a kiss, a drop of blood, an act of sex, a death.  These shards tend to make Exquisites look inhuman or strange; they are not the dead giveaways of Objects of Mystery, but they can certainly be picked out.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Godshards as Dark Appetites
Not only are the gods broken, they are insane.  Godshards of this kind never have the quality Lax Code, and at least half the laws of their Codes mandate committing some sort of atrocity on a regular basis or in response to a common event.  The Aspect of the godshard manifests as increasing madness along with the ordinary signs.  These godshards can manifest as any of the physical types, but it would be interesting if they needed to be transferred through pain - bloodletting, mutual ordeals, torturing the recipient - whatever makes the darkness happy.

Shard properties for Dark Appetite shards:
Prohibition of Mercy: +1
The shard holds to an additional law, of this form: "Never protect anyone against things of my domain."
Unspeakable Harvest: +1
The shard can only regain points by harming others in such a way that the holder is harmed as well.

Properties for Objects of Mystery:
Banner of Power: +2
The Exquisite's Aspect can be seen for miles when his shard becomes excited, and it is instantly recognizable to anyone with a smattering of mythology or lore.  Also, any Exquisite within sight of the Aspect will have his own Aspect flare similarly.
Mindshattering: +3
The shard's Aspect manifestations are bizarre, dazzling displays of the impossible.  An exquisite holding Beauty would be infinitely, mind-crushingly gorgeous from some angles, and each lesser part would hold an eternity of lesser beauties reflected within.  Fractal instances of abstract concepts are great for this kind of thing.  Mindshattering Aspects have double the ordinary Integrity.  Anyone laying eyes on a Mindshattering Aspect has to resist its Integrity with Hear to tear their attention away from its contemplation.

[Jonathan Walton]

Reaction to godshard aesthetics:

Rethinking my earlier suggestion, I think you need to be clear about creating a distinct aesthetic feel for Exquisite, to differentiate it from other projects you're working on (esp. Torchbearer) that have similar themes.  While the Fudge-esque notion of allowing groups to build their own aesthetic is cool, it doesn't give prospective players much to sink their teeth into.  I think you need a foundation of some kind and "Objects of Mystery" strays too close to the Torchbearer aesthetic for my tastes.

Immediately, the ones that jumped out at me were "Beauty Broken," "Dark Appetites," and the transferal method from "Spiritual Power."  The former is delicious.  It fits your theme of dead gods, but also is fairly unique as an aesthetic component.  Not many people would immediately pick "busted stuff" as a way to make their game cool.  "Dark Appetites" screams of the One Ring + Charnel Gods + Abyssal Exalted, and I would love to see it combined with "Beauty Broken."  I see images of characters bearing talismen of things destroyed, like Piggy's glasses in "Lord of the Flies," that begin to demand equity from their carriers, wanting to break them as they have been broken.  Those who would dare to seek godly power suffer for their hubris.  That kind of thing.

Finally, your "a kiss, a drop of blood, an act of sex, a death" is one of the best built-in plot factories that I've ever seen.  In a world of dead gods and broken people, what's more ironic than requiring them to make connections with each other?  It really does seem like you're creating a subgenre: post-apocalyptic mythic fantasy.  Like Changeling during the Long Winter or Nobilis after the Excrucian Triumph.  Many of your themes  (brokeness, corruption, parasites, lack of meaning, etc.) are already present in many PA games, but don't usually have a home in mythic fantasy.  Sounds like an interesting brew.  I'd be excited to hear more.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Gee, you know, I never saw Exquisite as PA, but it certainly is.  How very strange.  That gives me a really strong pair of resonating genres.  Hooray!

I agree that Beauty Broken and Dark Appetites seem to be natural to combine, and the idea that the shards want to break their bearers fits just too neatly into that harmony.  I see characters weeping at the thought of using their powers, fearing to leave an error uncorrected but fearing more to give the shard just one more inch of space, a single moment out in the sun.  At the same time, I see a kind of 'eaten from the inside' dynamic - the shards are bits of a once-glorious whole, and their powers create harmony and wonderment even while destroying the people that use them.  While the power can be used to heal and restore, it drives its wielders to rape and destroy, and ultimately to turn on each other.  Man, it's late tonight and I have Canada in the morning, better print this thread out and work on it while I'm travelling.

[MathiasJack]

Jonathan Walton wrote:

Nobilis after the Excrucian Triumph

After reading the last two posts, my imagination salvates at the idea of a Post-Apocalyptic Mythic (Post-Mythic?) game. With the direction that the thread has taken, I almost envision Exquisite as if it were Nobolis where you played both a Nobolis and an Excrucian at the same time.

To drive the Highlander concept a bit more, maybe one way to delay the pain and suffering of your godshard, to be able to do some good a bit longer, you can "sacrifice" (kill) another Exquisite to consume his or her Godshard. Of course, this is like credit - you are making yourself more powerful in the exchange, able to delay the inevitable a bit longer, but all at the cost of it hitting home all the harder later. How long can you post pone your loss of control to your God-shard, your damnation?

I think one of the most "exquisite" themes running through this game is of beauty loss. An Exquisite doesn't have a demon-shard, it is a God-shard. Once it stood for something more than it does now in its tragic destruction. And you can feel it twisting you right along with it.

Of course, ironically, most demons or evil gods were the "good" gods of some conquered past people.

Definitely interested to see what you do with this game,
Jack